Romanesque with a Twist: Almazán, Soria

Twelfth-century San Miguel in Almazán
All photos in this post 2019 Jessica Knauss 

I'd been too satisfied with our visit to Almenar to think about much else, but Daniel said, "We have to visit Almazán. Trust me." He was using a guidebook to the "best" Romanesque sites in Spain, and it was turning out to be highly reliable, and really, I'm content with any vaguely medieval site you can show me, so of course I didn't object.

What are some good adjectives for Almazán? Twisted. Skewed. Awry. Catawumpus. Cockeyed.

How so? The above photo is the plaza where we parked. Notice anything unusual?

But let's allow the Romanesque Church of San Miguel to fully illustrate this idea.

San Miguel is in the enormous Plaza Mayor, where the Palace of the Counts of Altamira serves as the tourism office. There you buy your ticket for the church tour. We had many other wonders on our itinerary that day, so we hesitated. I'm so glad we stayed.

San Miguel is right up against the medieval town wall. 

This National Monument was started in the twelfth century. It's fundamentally a Cistercian structure, but the external decoration of the apse has Lombardic-Catalan influence. The lantern is octagonal, using the Romanesque number symbolism for resurrection and suggesting that this church was important in burial rites. Its brickwork screams Mudejar style, and when we go inside, we see that style persists in the dome underneath it. The stones and bricks are laid with the exacting care typical of Romanesque perfectionism.

So when Daniel said we had to see this church because its floor plan is uniquely crooked--couldn't I see it?--I was gobsmacked. No, I couldn't see it, no matter how many photos I snapped. Examining them now, I notice the evidence. Above, for example, the semicircular apse doesn't have a 90-degree angle on either side where it meets the transept. You can kind of see how it doesn't line up with the lantern tower.

More clues are found in this close-up of the apse from the inside. Notice how the pew benches line up with the transept and end up at a wonky angle from the main altar. The crucifix hangs exactly between the sides of the archway, but fails to hang directly in front of the central window. The outermost and inner arches themselves (lightly pointed in Cistercian style) are off kilter.

It's even easier to see in this horizontal photo, considering that I'm standing square with the transept--insofar as that's possible. 

This archway on the left of the apse, close to number 8 on the floor plan below, ended up ridiculously compressed while its mate on the right gives a good pretense of being normal.

In this shot of the same arch seen from below, I dare you to find something--anything!--that lines up properly.

The tour guide rightly spent a lot of time pointing out the features of the magnificent dome. Eight slim arches cross to form an octagonal opening at the top. This is already a great architectural feat, but because we're in Almazán, it has the uniqueness of making the stone look like taffy that's been given a good pull.

I stared up at the dome, but got overwhelmed... by its immense beauty.

We weren't allowed to take photos of any of the very fine painted Gothic and Baroque figures in the church, but luckily, this altar frontal is in bare stone. Although badly worn away or perhaps mutilated, the carving that remains is exquisite. It's a depiction of the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket. This English saint was killed (by a large number of knights, in this depiction) in front of the altar inside Canterbury Cathedral in 1170.

Most of the column capitals are Cistercian plant patterns, but a few were lovely, if high-up, allegories of uncertain interpretation. Here, for example, we have a man on the corner gripping birds by the neck. Birds usually represent the human soul, but it's hard to tell whether they're being saved or dragged down in this case. If anyone has seen this capital closer up and knows of a detail that reveals its intention, please let me know!

Almazán's quirkiness is probably best illustrated by the floor plan:

Floor plan from the pamphlet,
produced by the Most Excellent City Government of Almazán

A lady on the tour had been sitting in one of the pews. When she stood up, she said it made her dizzy! I was trying not to walk or turn around too fast, myself, but I got overexcited, anyway (as I'm prone to do in such places), and felt the seasickness effect for a second. It made me wonder, as everyone else on the tour already had, why the church had been purposefully constructed in such an unusual manner. Did they want to make themselves dizzy with devotion? 

The tour guide insisted we'll never know the answer. One idea is that a few Romanesque churches took the symbolism of their floor plans a long way: figuring that the transept represents the arms of Jesus's cross, the apse must represent the head. The apse is, indeed, considered the holiest part of any Western Catholic medieval church. Since Jesus's head is tilted in most crucifixions, some ingenious architects tilted their apses. But this cannot be the case here, because Jesus's head always tilts toward his right, and if you consider the floor plan, this apse tilts toward his left. Additionally, the apse tilt is only the most obvious part of the twisting nature of this church.

This ivy-covered building is the Santa Teresa Chapel, which makes up the left side of the transept, number 7 in the floor plan above. Here we see the drop-off that starts right at the edge of church and the town wall. The church was a major component in the city's fortification. Perhaps the builders needed to follow the line of the cliff so the defense wouldn't be interrupted with weak points where enemies could gain their footing. Of course, that begs the question, again, why would they want to follow the landscape so literally with the entire building? Why not make only one side curvy? Why not continue the wall along the cliff and bring the church in a little way so it could be a regular, straight, tidy Cistercian Romanesque beacon? 

I fancy someone wrote down the extensive debates that took place over this issue in the public forum, and one day, someone will find that record. In the meantime, it could be a fun plot point in a historical novel...